Using Lightroom CC as a Camera
Below are 4 camera apps (stock Camera, Adoble Lightroom, Halide, and Obscurs 2) taking the same photo. It’s early morning, my living room has no lights on, and it’s bright outside.
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Lightroom is my go-to RAW camera app for iOS, in part because I pay for Creative Cloud and want to get my money’s worth, bot more so because I think it gets the best photos of any app I’ve tried before.
The difference between this image and what the stock camera app produced is night and day. This is a much more satisfying shot with little noise, good color, properly exposed highlights, and zero artifacts.
The built-in Camera app made an unexpectedly poor showing. I didn’t realize that the Lightroom app had a camera, but it looks pretty good: lots of controls, a clear interface, support for both RAW and HDR (which you can lock on), a widget for quick access.
However, I don’t know how to use it with my workflow, which right now is using Image Capture to import from my Camera Roll into Lightroom Classic CC. It looks like you have to manually share photos from Lightroom to the Camera Roll, and you can’t do this in bulk; you have to select the specific photos.
The other option is to let the phone upload the photos to Creative Cloud, then wait for the Mac to download them. This is slow and wastes bandwidth and may not finish if the app goes into the background or the phone sleeps. The photos do automatically show up in Lightroom Classic CC, and you can then move them into a regular Lightroom folder. However, this does not remove them from the iPhone. You have to go back there and manually delete them (again, individually). I hope I’m missing something here.
Previously: The Best Third-party Camera App for iPhone, The Power of RAW on iPhone, New Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic CC.
5 Comments RSS · Twitter
I just did a photo session this afternoon using the Lightroom CC camera. Unfortunately, Adobe seems to have removed the feature that used the gyro to show an on-screen level. I take photos of kitchen/bath remodeling projects, and this level feature was super useful for making sure that stuff like the geometry of tile grout lines and shower borders were in proper perspective. It was definitely more frustrating shooting today without it.
As far as getting the raw DNGs out of the app, unfortunately I don't think you're missing anything, Michael. So long as I've used the app, I've had to manually Export Original to the Camera Roll one at a time. Super frustrating, but since I only have to export a few dozen photos once every couple months, I put up with it. Now that the level feature is gone, I might have to start looking elsewhere. And yeah, I'm not even logged into CC on the iPhone app... don't want any complications from cloud syncing.
@Michael Thanks! That was the one button I didn't tap because the grid was already enabled and I assumed that's all the button did...
